


I Must Break And Shatter Beautifully

by mihrsuri



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Ableism, Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, Child Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Trauma, female chessmaster tiss, witcher hunger games
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:01:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28088958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mihrsuri/pseuds/mihrsuri
Summary: But they are there to loathe her and that makes it the better of two awful options in Tissaia’s head, at least most of the time.  [Tissaia and her backstory in my witcher hunger games verse]
Kudos: 5





	I Must Break And Shatter Beautifully

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains a lot of content warnings for violence (sexual, physical and emotional) as well as some extremely gross and disturbing ableism/eugenics which the author as a disabled biracial woman who desperately wants to be a mother definitely does not endorse.

Mostly Tiss stays far far away from District 10 - she’s made herself useful enough to the Capital that she doesn’t have to serve as mentor there, doesn’t have to face that particular variant of sending children to deaths that are certainties. Ten kids don’t win - Tissaia knows she was an anomaly. She also knows she’s not enough of a monster to feed delusions to scared children about how they could repeat it. 

No, much better to design training programs for children so they might have a chance at killing other children and coming out to decades of being sold off and reliving their trauma every year. Which might only be another variety of child murder but at least this way Tiss might be able to save some of them. Is able to say that some of the children she designs training for don’t have to go at all - even though some of them hate her for that as much as the ones who hate her because she sent them into the games. 

But they are there to loathe her and that makes it the better of two awful options in Tissaia’s head, at least most of the time. 

She’d never planned on the games and she had reason for it, more reason than most children growing up in the non career districts because she’d had parents who could make the odds bend in her favour. They’d been the managers of one of the big ranches that dotted Ten and Tiss had been bright enough to be picked out for a program that would ultimately have meant she would have gone to the University in three. Would have ended up heading it. 

Tiss never talked about her family because she’d made sure to talk about them enough in public that no one in the capital didn’t know the story now and therefore weren’t interested in. She never talked about her time in one of the group homes before her reaping because the capital would never have wanted to know beyond the fact that there was a darling, tragically orphaned girl who had been given the gift of victory and a new family. 

It doesn’t make her feel sick to repeat that line now because she’d trained herself out of it, just like she’d trained herself out of all of her games related fears - lightning, knives, eels (there’d been some kind of bio-weapon in the water not in her tower that had turned a great number of the tributes into eel mutations) and sharp rocks. 

Not the ocean though for all that her games were an ocean of wild crashing waves against the shore and one lone island in which her tower had jutted out. She’d swum for it because her parents had taught her to swim, because she’d realised that the tempting water and shelter on the main land was almost certainly bristling with hidden traps and because Tiss had thought that her suffering could be beautiful. Could be entertaining. 

Even then she’d been good at knowing how to be entertaining - the archly smart and amusing girl without a hair out of place but also how to break down in a way that would be appealing. She’d made herself do that, dragged herself through the ocean to a tower that contained food, shelter, warmth and clean water and then made sure she suffered enough defending it. 

Tiss had been certain she wanted to survive enough to suffer for a short time. She had been certain enough she wanted to thrive afterwards to plunge herself into a pool of eels, to face lightning storms and knives. To deliberately make sure she was put in a vulnerable position over and over again so she could conquer her brain, her body, her terror. 

Sometimes that meant just being scared and vulnerable. Snow had enjoyed that, the composed girl humbled with her hair loose around her face, wearing a loose white dress. Her clients enjoy that too - though some of them like to think they are unravelling her themselves - pulling out tightly pinned hair, unbuttoning her severest and plainest costumes and draping her in soft sheer silks. 

(Tissaia still has ‘clients’(her usefulness has given her immunity from much of the ‘duties’ of most Victors outside of Two but Snow wants to make sure Tiss knows that she’s still his to control and so she bows her head))

It might actually make Tissaia laugh if she hadn’t trained herself out of it, that they think they’ve unravelled her when she’d already decided to do that to herself, to face her worst fears because the capital would use it against her and she wanted to control it. 

And if that means that she is truly shaking, is truly vulnerable then that is the price she pays for her survival. Perhaps it is the penance too, that she trains young women to kill, to sell themselves, to survive to become something like her. 

But she doesn’t go near District Ten. She doesn’t go back. Most of Panem has forgotten she was ever anything but what she is now. And then there is Yennefer. She can’t explain what it is about the girl, not entirely but looking into the violet eyes Tissaia can see rage, yes but she can also see intelligence. Can see that this one? This one wants to survive. This one could endure what surviving meant.

-

What Yen thinks when her name is called, because of course it is, because her fucking pig of a stepfather is looking smugly pleased with himself as if he had enough influence or friends to fix it for certain rather than being a small minded little shit of a supervisor who’d made her take so much tesserae over the last few years that of course it was going to be her. 

He hadn’t even given it to Yen’s mother and sisters for all that he’d always gabbled about how Yen should be doing it to relieve the ugly burden she was. He’d sold it for good things for himself, because a selfish small man doesn’t change and Yen thinks he might have hated her because aside from the fact she apparently offends his eyes Yen can’t hide how much she hates him. 

Her mother can, but then her mother is beautiful and her mother can keep him happy when Yen has never been able to, no matter what she does ever since he had set his sights on Anila Vengerberg. Yen had watched her mother look beautiful even amongst shovelling pig shit and envied her - beauty had meant more food, had meant a certain amount of ease. It might have meant enduring her pig stepfather but that had at least meant moving somewhere not directly near the pig sheds. It had meant Yen’s younger sisters would grow up in a cleaner place. 

When her name is called he thinks she’ll cry, that she’ll be afraid and beg and scream and look even uglier. Instead she pulls herself as high as she can and refuses to not look everyone in the eyes. Refuses to not make them uncomfortable. 

She shuts out the sound of her mother and sisters crying. She can’t think about them and she won’t. 

When Tissaia de Vries arrives in the room she’s in instead of her mother and sisters Yen goggles. She nearly starts to cry, nearly demands that the woman go, that if Yen is going to die she wants her sisters and mother to hug her before she dies but there’s something in the victors expression that makes Yen stop. 

“You have another choice, besides dying. I think you can live - I think you want to live. I wouldn’t be here if I thought you couldn’t but there is one thing - I want you to understand what it means if you do. If at the end you do not believe you can bear it I will leave this room and not look back.”

Tissaia explains. Yen agrees, because of course she agrees. Being a victor is power and beauty both. It is being a danger. It is the chance to shed the pig girl. 

Yen doesn’t cry again. She refuses to. She doesn’t see her mother and sisters either. She walls them off. Yen doesn’t object to anything either, because Tissaia had told her not to. She smiles, she makes her eyes wide with wonder and gratitude and wants to kill all of them at the same time she’s so grateful. 

“She’s ugly but oh, those eyes” one of her stylists coos and Yen just ducks her head and thinks very hard that she is grateful, she is so grateful and so happy to be here, so happy. 

No one pays her any real attention. But Yen, does know how to handle fire. How to slaughter a pig. How to be hungry and how to stay unnoticed because if she stayed unnoticed she was beaten and bullied far less. And Yen takes in everything. Stays unmemorable but does well enough in training that she knows there will be at least some interest, even if she isn’t anything to look at. 

Yen’s games are stone and dirt and ruins. She hates them but she does better than many of the other tributes. She runs, she hides and she finds a dagger. The moment she stabs the D6 boy who’d tried to grab her Yen feels nothing but a fierce delight that she’s alive. That her pig stepfather had seen what she’d do to him. He’d wanted to rape her and now he’s dead and Yen feels no guilt. Feels that he stands in for all the other boys and men who’d wanted to do the same, who’d thought she’d fuck them because she was desperate. 

Yen’s games end in fire and she laughs because it’s a release and it’s still not enough, this fire and blood but it’s something. She’s done it. She’s earned this reward. 

Yen wakes up again and Tissaia doesn’t need to tell her to smile and say she’s so grateful, that she’ll spend every day working to repay the generosity she’s been shown here and Yen is delighted, of course she’s delighted. She’s beautiful now. She’s powerful. She chose this. She chose to let the capital make her into something more. 

“Of course, you can’t have children now - it was the best thing really, considering what you looked like before! We didn’t want to create another like you” 

Yen just smiles at them and says of course, of course she agrees, no one would want another hideous creature like that. 

She doesn’t go back to District Ten but she does make sure her mother and sisters are moved into the Victors Village. That her sisters will want for nothing ever again, that her mother will never have to endure her stepfather. 

He is hanged not long after her victory tour and the satisfaction of the fact that he knows that she was the one who killed him will keep Yen warm for a long time. 

Yennefer choses to become a courtesan in the Capital. It’s important, she says to Tissaia that everyone knows Yen choose this. This is her power now, that she is so good at inflicting pain, at inflicting pleasure. The capital likes this - the ugly pig girl transformed into a beautiful deadly woman. An ornament with a whip. They all think that they control her, even as they submit to her but they don’t understand. 

Yen doesn’t understand either, not then. That takes time. Time for her to resent Tissaia for thinking that explaining what came after the games was enough for her to absolve herself of what it meant to come out.


End file.
